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Soul

I don't often think about souls or my soul -- feel a bit sheepish about it, because, why not? I decided early on that souls are for people who want to live forever in heaven, and I am so over that :). But while throwing out ideas about afterlife, I wonder if I've also tended to turn away from the spiritual value in simply being alive, being embodied, being a person among a family of persons, or being a river or a rock (I really enjoyed the quick depiction of animism in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul ). There is something so respectful about recognizing another person as a soul -- acknowledging the divine in that human being.

A thread from last week: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reincarnation_research -- it could be that our ideas about reincarnation are just too primitive and riddled with faulty assumptions to be right (we think reincarnation has to do with the continuation of a self, that one and many are different, etc). But maybe some day, we'll have a way of understanding that can permit these anecdotal stories rather than dismiss them as "unscientific".